While the problem of service hosting does resemble the long-studied content caching problem [1]}, [2]}, [3]}, [4]}, [5]}, [6]}, there are important differences. In particular, unlike the content caching problem, whenever a user request cannot be served at the edge there is an option to either simply forward that request or download the entire service at higher cost. This fundamentally changes the problem and in fact, prior work [7]}, [8]} has demonstrated the sub-optimal performance for service hosting of several popular schemes which work well in the traditional content caching setting. Finally, we would like to point out that partial storage of files has been studied in the context of traditional content caching [1]}, [10]}. Here, the fraction of query served varies linearly with the fraction of the file stored, whereas the dependence can be more varied for the service caching problem studied in this work. We indeed observe such behavior for a shortest path query system we design using data from a GPS trajectory dataset [11]}, [12]}, [13]}. Details can be found in the simulations section.
